"That is the reason why you hear about the Clover Leaf Club, which receives letters from men and women who want to marry, and the officers sort them out and bring together the couples which they think are well matched. That's why you see sometimes in the newspapers advertisements for husbands, occasionally even for foreign husbands," she laughed demurely. "Oh, that's silly, I know, but still it all shows how we feel. And that's how I feel. I don't want to marry, at least, not now; but if I ever do, I shall want to make my own choice, and I shall surely choose a man who believes as I do.
"That's the trouble in Japan, if a girl grows a few years older than twenty, the family consider that it is a disgrace if she doesn't marry. That is why they are beginning to worry about me, especially as they have had to give it up about my sister; but then they think that in her case it is the fault of the schooling she received abroad. So now they are doubly anxious on my account; they don't want two old maids well over twenty in the family. But now that I have run away, that would be an even worse scandal. The papers would play it up as they did the countess who tried to commit double suicide with a chauffeur, or as they did with Akiko-san, the millionaire's wife who ran away with a poet. You know, I have been in the papers once already. That was when they were making such a fuss about Japanese girls dancing foreign fashion, and some of them even published the names of girls who went to dances. One of them mentioned my name, and my parents were so angry. Now, if they don't leave me alone, I won't go home, and the papers will learn about my having run away, and that will be worse than ever, especially because I have run away to a foreigner."
She leaned back, crossed one knee over the other, looked at him expectantly. She had gained her composure entirely, even enjoyed the situation, now that the difficult part, the telling, was done with. She evidently anticipated approval from him, praise of her cleverness. But the revelation of her motive in coming to him was like a douche of cold water. Of course, he ought to be pleased. What he had taken to be the unfolding of a melodrama, tragedy possibly, developing slowly, ominously, towards an inescapable woeful climax, had suddenly grotesquely become transformed into a droll burlesque, fantastic but harmless. But the suddenness of the metamorphosis irritated him, the sense of finding himself taking a rôle in farce where he had, gravely, been preparing himself for pathos. So all his vain imaginings that she might have sought him out because of affection on her part, because of her having greater confidence in him, was mere fancy. The little minx was using him merely as a convenient lay figure where a moment before he had thought himself to be cast in a principal rôle. What an anti-climax!